Dozens
of House lawmakers want the Obama administration to release the secret “black
budget” used to fund intelligence agencies.

A bipartisan group of 62
members of Congress wrote President Obama a letter on Wednesday asking him to
release the fiscal 2015 spending levels for 16 federal spy agencies when he
delivers the rest of his budget to Congress on March 4.

“The current practice of
providing no specificity whatsoever regarding the overall budget requests for
each intelligence agency falls woefully short of basic accountability
requirements,” the legislators wrote.

“As you develop your fiscal year 2015 budget, we strongly urge you to take a
simple step toward much needed transparency by including the total amount
requested for each of the sixteen intelligence agencies. We believe the top
line number for each agency should be made public, with no risk to national
security, for comparative purposes across all federal government agencies.”
Wednesday’s request was led by Reps.
Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who last month introduced the
Intelligence Budget Transparency Act. The bill would require the
administration to release basic details about the spy agencies’ budgets.

The federal government has
disclosed the overall amount of money spent to fund the intelligence community
since 2007, but has kept classified more specific details about the individual
budgets of agencies like the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA).

Documents released by
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year showed that the CIA has grown to eat up about 28
percent of the $52.6 billion spent in 2013. The $14.7 billion it received was
about 50 percent more than the NSA’s funding.

The White House did not
immediately respond to an inquiry from The Hill about the lawmakers' request.

The National
Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the
primary method to locate targets for lethal
drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent
or unidentified people.Read more

Over the past
eight months, classified documents provided by Edward Snowden have exposed scores of secret government surveillance
programs. Yet there is little visual material among the blizzard of code
names, PowerPoint slides, court rulings and spreadsheets that have emerged from
the National Security Agency’s files.Read more

For nine years,
the U.S.
government refused to let a Stanford PhD student named Rahinah Ibrahim back in
the country after putting her on the no-fly list for no apparent reason. For
eight years, U.S.
government lawyers fought Ibrahim’s request that she be told why.Read more

James Clapper,
President Obama’s top national security official, is probably best known for
having been caught lying outright to
Congress about NSA activities, behavior which (as some baseball players found
out) happens to be a felony under federal law.Read more

CITIZEN SNOWDEN:
WHY HE MATTERS

Who knew that1984was a how-to manual? Of course, George
Orwell did not intend for his novel about life in a dystopian, totalitarian
society to be a blueprint for a secret surveillance state. Yet, unbeknownst to
us supposedly sovereign US citizens, a cabal of militarists, corporate
contractors, a handful of in-the-know politicos, and some Rambo-esque
intelligence operatives appear to have been ripping pages right out of 1984 to
guide their clandestine creation of just such a despotic mechanism deep within
our own government.

The We are very
excited to welcome everyone toThe Intercept, a publication of First Look Media (FLM).The Intercept, which the three of us created, is the
first of what will be numerous digital magazines published by FLM.Read more

The Intercept’s inaugural exposé, by my colleagues Glenn Greenwald and
Jeremy Scahill, illuminates the deeply flawed
interaction between omnipresent electronic surveillance and targeted drone
killings –- two of the three new, highly disruptive instruments of national
power that President Obama has pursued with unanticipated enthusiasm.Read more

Chris Hedges, Truthdig Op-Ed, NationofChange, Feb. 18, 2014: The government officials who, along with their courtiers in
the press, castigate Snowden insist that congressional and judicial
oversight, the right to privacy, the rule of law, right of the press and the
right to express dissent remain inviolate. They use the old words and the old
phrases, old laws and old constitutional allows our corporate totalitarianism
a democratic veneer. They insist that the system works. They tell us we are
still protected by the Fourth Amendment.